Court cites city code; watchdog wants it changed

Illinois' highest court made it clear Thursday that when push comes to shove, City Hall's top corruption buster answers to the very mayor he's supposed to keep watch over.

The state Supreme Court issued a unanimous ruling that Inspector General Joseph Ferguson cannot independently go to court to enforce a subpoena for documents from the mayor's administration.

Instead, he must ask the corporation counsel, the city's top lawyer who reports directly to the mayor, to enforce those subpoenas. If the lawyer refuses, the dispute must be settled by the mayor.

"With today's ruling, the public and the City Council should now know that the inspector general has access only to the records and materials the mayor and his corporation counsel wish to make available, when they decide to make them available," Ferguson said in a statement.

In its ruling, the Supreme Court noted the city ordinance that created the office of inspector general gives that office the power to issue subpoenas but not to hire a lawyer to enforce them.

Justice Lloyd Karmeier, who wrote the opinion, said leaving the decision to go to court to the corporation counsel, when he was "the very person who was subpoenaed ... present(s) an obvious conflict of interest."

But that conflict "did not confer on the inspector general any right to go beyond his specified authority under the Chicago municipal code and unilaterally decide to hire his own lawyers to bring suit," Karmeier wrote.

Ferguson called on the mayor to initiate a change in city code to give his office unfettered access to documents, including the power to enforce its own subpoenas.

He noted that in December 2010, when Rahm Emanuel was in the early stages of his campaign, he stood alongside former Inspector General David Hoffman and said "any efforts to block the inspector general from getting information will not be tolerated."

Instead, Emanuel and his corporation counsel, Stephen Patton, fought the case to limit subpoena enforcement all the way to the Supreme Court, after an appellate court concluded Ferguson did have the authority to enforce subpoenas.

Patton said Thursday that the mayor believes Ferguson has sufficient powers.

"The mayor supports a vigorous office of the inspector general to help him root out waste, fraud and corruption," Patton said. "This decision does not in any way diminish the city inspector general's independence or ability to discover or root out wrongdoing, nor does it diminish in any way this administration's commitment to working with the inspector general to investigate and root out wrongdoing."

The Illinois Supreme Court's ruling stems from a dispute between the inspector general's office and then-Mayor Richard M. Daley. The former mayor denied the inspector general full access to documents subpoenaed in a probe of a no-bid contract given to a onetime Daley employee.

In the original probe, launched in 2007, Daley's lawyers invoked attorney-client privilege, saying parts of the Law Department documents dealt with protected communications between employees and their city attorneys and thus could not be revealed.

The high court did not address the attorney-client privilege issue. Instead, it focused on the underlying issue of whether the inspector general could go to court to enforce his own subpoenas.